The present invention refers to a surgical cloth provided with a central hole, which uncovers the operation area, said cloth being intended as a protection of the wound edges around an incision.
Previously known surgical cloths of this kind are usually provided with a plastic ring around the hole, which is introduced into the wound cavity, so that the surgical cloth surrounds as well the wound edges as the surrounding operation area. This kind of operation cloth can be used only for incisions with a length corresponding to the diameter of the plastic ring and it is therefore necessary to have surgical cloths with plastic rings of different sizes. It is not unusual that the operation area has to be enlarged during the operation, which means that a new surgical cloth with a larger plastic ring has to be used. These circumstances have involved that surgical cloths of this known type have been used only to a very limited extent and since the protection of the wound edges against repeated contamination during the operation is an important demand, it has hitherto been a clearly expressed desire to provide a surgical cloth, which easily can be adjusted to a desired size but still also is simple to introduce into the wound cavity and which without a previous time-requiring handling is ready for immediate introduction into the wound. Since the surgical cloth is a throw-away article it must also be simple and cheap to manufacture and adapted for sterilization.